Driver: San Francisco

I got this one as a Christmas present from my mother, who hardly ever buys me games, back in 2011, I think. I must have been going through a phase because I requested this one and Need for Speed: The Run, I game I completed before I started writing about completions.

Anyway, Driver is another one of those games where I completed the single player a million years ago (hyperbole) and left the multiplayer because I didn’t have a sickness. Well, now the sickness has developed and I went back and put the effort into finishing the multiplayer... by buying another copy of the game, but more on that the later.

The story sees you take control of Detective John Tanner... sort of. Driver is an open world game where in order to streamline the gameplay, John is in a coma and his subconscious is floating around the city taking control of cars in order to catch the guy that put him in the coma in the first place. Yes, it’s that bizarre.

Along the way you will have to do lots of crazy stunts in various cars as you progress through the game. The driving game play is pretty solid to be fair but saying that, they did create an open world and then circumvent any real exploration factors by comatosing the main character – a bit of a bizarre decision.

The music and graphics are acceptable for the type of game. The music is good but gets very repetitive after a while. When I was playing the multiplayer, I kept getting 5 year old flashbacks to having to listen to the same tune over and over again when driving around the city.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Of the 50 available achievements, 11 are story related but in reality there are loads of other small ones which you will naturally attain. There are only a handful that you have to really work for.

Some of these harder ones involve completing the in-game activities. You need to do 50 of these to get an achievement. You also have to do all 80 dares throughout the game. From what I remember, these aren’t too difficult, just time consuming. Other time consuming and awkward things involve having to purchase all the cars from the garage, switch into vehicles 1,000 times and drive 1,000 miles.

The last achievement I picked up from my single player experience was for collecting all 13 of the movie clip things – shocking considering there are only 13 of them. They are put in really hard to reach places and you have to be pretty inventive to be get them, using car transporters as ramps. Getting the position right was painful though.

There are two other notable achievements. One of them pays tribute to Back to the Future by having you complete challenges in the Delorean. The other wants you to be really stupid and complete a Getaway Activity in a Car Transporter. I can’t even remember how I did this but it pre-dates my use of guides so I must have got lucky as it’s apparently quite difficult to do.

Multiplayer

So the reason this is a late 2016 (still behind on the reviews) completion rather than 2012 is due to the multiplayer that I didn’t even attempt. All of the achievements bar three can be obtained with two players so I went through the painful and repetitive process of grinding out most of these alone.

The three that require other people involved having to play Blitz, Capture the Flag and Carry the Torch and do things a certain amount of times. This is made even more annoying because you have to get to certain multiplayer levels before some of these game types even unlock – this made it even more necessary for the second copy as I had to get to the relevant levels before I could play these games with other people.

The rest of it was just horrible grinding up to level 38 to unlock the Master achievement. In relative terms it didn’t actually take me that long but it was still a shitty task that I’m not proud of completing.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Driver is a solid single player driving experience that I remember as an enjoyable escape for the most part. The multiplayer is unnecessary and considering the age of the game, will now likely be impossible to complete legitimately. If you are a completionist and bothered about legitimate online play, then steer clear. It’s still worth it for the single player though.